The Los Angeles Rams and quarterback Jared Goff agreed to terms on a four-year contract extension that will keep Goff with the team through the 2024 season, the Rams announced Tuesday night.

The extension is worth $134 million and includes an NFL-record $110 million guaranteed, a source told ESPN's Adam Schefter.

Those figures top the ones the Philadelphia Eagles awarded quarterback Carson Wentz in early June. Wentz, who was selected second overall behind Goff in the 2016 draft, got a four-year extension worth $128 million, with $107.9 million guaranteed.

Goff, 24, is entering the fourth season of his five-year rookie deal. He is scheduled to earn $4.3 million this season and $22.8 million in 2020. With the two existing years he had remaining on his contract, Goff is now tied to the Rams for six seasons and $161 million, a source told Schefter.

At the outset of training camp, Rams general manager Les Snead said that it was "not a matter of if but when" a deal would be made with Goff, and Rams coach Sean McVay said that he hoped to be "stuck" with Goff for a long time.

The Rams made a dramatic move up the draft board to select Goff in 2016, trading from the 15th pick to the top overall selection. They have been on the clock to complete an extension with Goff since Wentz signed his extension with Philadelphia.

When asked during training camp what he wanted in a contract, Goff said, "I'm interested in winning games, and whatever the best way to do that is, is what I'm for."

Following a tumultuous rookie season, which included seven winless starts under former Rams coach Jeff Fisher, Goff has flourished.

In two seasons under McVay, Goff has led the team to consecutive division titles, an NFC championship and an appearance in Super Bowl LIII, which was the Rams' first Super Bowl appearance since the 2001 season. He has been selected to two Pro Bowls and is 24-14 as a starter.

Goff has passed for 9,581 yards and 65 touchdowns, with 26 interceptions, and has completed 62.1% of his throws.

The Brooklyn Nets are looking into allegations of domestic violence against Rodions Kurucs after the forward was arrested in Brooklyn and released without bail Tuesday.

Kurucs was arraigned on a misdemeanor assault charge and is due back in court Oct. 21.

The New York Daily News, citing police sources, reports Kurucs allegedly choked his then-girlfriend in his Brooklyn apartment on June 27.

"After learning of the allegations against Rodions Kurucs, we notified and are assisting the League Office as they begin the process of gathering more information," the Nets said in a statement. "The Nets organization takes allegations of this nature with extreme seriousness. While the investigation is underway and as we continue to learn more, we will refrain from commenting further."

Kurucs, according to the Daily News, allegedly put his hand around his then-girlfriend's throat and choked her, later pushing her on his bed, slapping her face and biting her lip. The report states he then picked her up and tossed her on the bed, injuring her ribs.

Judge Gina Abadi issued an order of protection and told Kurucs to stay away from the woman, the Daily News reports.

Alex Spiro, Kurucs' attorney, told ESPN in a statement, "The former couple flew away together arm in arm in the days that followed, and only after an unfortunate breakup did these claims appear -- claims that the misdemeanor hearing revealed were backed by no photographs or objective medical facts."

The 6-foot-9, 210-pound Kurucs averaged 8.5 points and 3.9 rebounds per game last season.

PITTSBURGH -- Pirates rookie right-hander Mitch Keller was pulled from Tuesday night's game with a bruised right wrist after being struck by a line drive.

Keller was injured in the second inning on a comebacker hit by Miami's Garrett Cooper. Considered the Pirates' top prospect going into the season, Keller was making his eighth major league start Tuesday night. He is 1-3 with an 8.18 ERA.

Keller was struck flush on the outer part of the wrist. The Pirates said initial imaging revealed only a bruise.

Clay Holmes relieved Keller with the game scoreless.

Houston Astros center fielder George Springer left Tuesday night's road game against the Milwaukee Brewers after crashing into the center-field wall while making a catch.

Springer made a leaping catch of a Ryan Braun shot to deep center to end the fifth inning, but his head crashed into the wall as he was landing. Teammates immediately rushed out to him, then called on athletic trainers, who tended to the star outfielder as he lay in pain on the ground.

After several minutes, Springer, 29, was able to stand up with the assistance of Houston manager AJ Hinch and a trainer before leaving the game on a cart that made its way to center field.

There was no immediate word on his condition.

CONCORD, N.C. – On Tuesday Matt DiBenedetto became the first NASCAR driver to shake down Charlotte Motor Speedway’s new ROVAL backstretch chicane.

DiBenedetto joined Greg Walter, the speedway’s executive vice president and general manager, for some hot laps aboard a Toyota Camry XSE pace car around the 19-turn, 2.28-mile road course oval that serves as the cutoff race for round one of the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series playoffs.

The backstretch chicane’s original layout was 32 feet wide at its widest point, while the new version will be 54 feet at its widest point and will feature additional runoff areas for DiBenedetto and his fellow competitors.

“I was just excited to check it out and be able to give some input on it,” DiBenedetto said. “This one being on a full straightaway is what will create a really hard, straight-line braking zone. It’s going to create an extra passing zone from what we had. It’s definitely going to be be more of a challenge – I’m guessing you’ll be going 30 miles per hour slower – so it’s a drastic change, but it’s better for the race.

“This will create a different opportunity that will change the outcome approaching the last corner of the track. Last year, this wasn’t a passing zone. It was a momentum corner. This year, it’s hard braking and it’ll feel like a parking lot. … It’s not just a small change. It affects our racing and our approach.”

In addition to the time he spent on the track, DiBenedetto gave Walter real-time feedback regarding the newest wrinkle to the first-of-its-kind ROVAL.

“As we were approaching the entrance to the chicane, Matt leans to me and says, ‘Oh yeah, this is going to make a difference,’” Walter said. “Braking equals passing. He confirmed everything we’ve been thinking about and what we’ve been designing. We’re going to see a great race.”

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – More than two weeks before entries open for the second Michelin IMSA SportsCar Encore at Sebring Int’l Raceway, Riley Motorsports has confirmed its plans to participate with a pair of Mercedes-AMG race cars for the event scheduled for Nov. 9-10.

The four-hour endurance race will feature LMP3, GT3, GT4 and TCR race cars competing for purse money and Michelin tire credits for the 2020 season.

Riley Motorsports currently fields Mercedes-AMG race cars in both the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship GT Daytona class as well as the IMSA Michelin Pilot Challenge Grand Sport class.

“Right now, we’re going to enter the Encore with the No. 74 Mercedes-AMG GT3 car driven by Gar Robinson and Lawson Aschenbach,” Team Owner Bill Riley said. “We think it’ll be a good way for us to start working with Lawson and Gar getting ready for the 2020 season. The second entry we have, we’re working on that right now on what class we’re going to enter. It’ll be with an AMG, and we don’t know if it’ll be a GT3 or GT4 car, so we’re working on getting that entry secured also.”

The announcement that Robinson and Aschenbach would be racing in the 2020 GTD class with Riley’s team came at Virginia Int’l Raceway last month. Riley acknowledges the Michelin Encore will be a significant opportunity for the new team to work together.

“When you look at the schedule for the weekend of the Encore, it’s pretty compressed, but it’s a lot of track time,” said Riley. “That helps us two-fold. One, it helps us get used to making quick decisions, and getting the car turned around quickly with the driver input. And, with a four-hour race, it lets the drivers get to see how they do over a long run with the setups we’ve been using and see how it all unfolds and what we need to build on going forward to Daytona.”

The benefits of competing at the Michelin Encore will extend past the Rolex 24 At Daytona in January, as the WeatherTech Championship, Pilot Challenge and Prototype Challenge all will return to Sebring in March for the iconic Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring Presented by Advance Auto Parts event week.

For Riley, whether it’s the Michelin Encore of the Twelve Hours of Sebring, he’s confident in the Mercedes-AMG product at the 3.74-mile circuit.

“We had a strong car at Sebring,” said Riley, who won the 2017 Twelve Hours of Sebring in the GTD class with drivers Ben Keating, Jeroen Bleekemolen and then-endurance driver Mario Farnbacher. “The AMG is always strong at Sebring, so I’m pretty confident we’ll have a pretty decent car for the Encore and the Twelve Hour. But it does at least make sure the feedback we get from Gar and Lawson is the same direction we’ve had over the last three years with AMG.”

Similar to the inaugural Michelin IMSA SportsCar Encore at Sebring in 2018, teams will be required to field a minimum of two drivers per car and a maximum of three. No Platinum-rated drivers will be allowed to compete and no driver lineup may have more than one Gold-rated driver. Driver lineups will be subject to IMSA approval.

Refueling, tire and driver changes all will be allowed to take place at the same time during pit stops (no timed stops). A maximum of three crew members will be permitted over the wall to provide any service, and only the exiting driver will be allowed to assist during driver changes.

The purse includes $10,000 for the winner in each class, as well as three sets of Michelin Pilot Sport GT tires. Second place in each class will receive two sets of tires while third-place finishers will receive one set.

Should any class have less than five cars, IMSA will reserve the right to modify or exclude the class before the event.

There's no debate: as a standalone tournament, the Women's World Cup is a rip-roaring, commercially viable success. The 2019 edition broke women's football viewing records around the world. This happened not only in Europe, where the time zones were friendly and new marks were set in France, Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom, but also in the United States and Brazil. In fact, according to FIFA, Brazil set a new global viewing record when 35 million watched the Selecao take on France in the Round of 16.

And it's not as if this audience was simply football junkies getting their fix at the end of the European season because there was nothing else on. They had plenty of other options, from the European Under 21 Championships to the Africa Cup of Nations, from the Copa America to the Gold Cup and Major League Soccer.

The tournament was rightly celebrated across mainstream media, but you can't help but wonder what happens next and whether the right questions are even being asked, not just of FIFA, but of stakeholders in the women's game -- players, fans, associations -- around the world. Because the risk for women's football is that it turns into most Olympic events: massive audiences and media attention every four years and then zero on the Richter scale until the next Olympiad. And like many Olympic events, not a true mass participation sport but a niche pursuit for the privileged elite.

There is a significant window of opportunity for women's football. It requires creative thinking. It requires belief. It requires a willingness to hold institutions, from FIFA to federations, to account. Above all, it requires a clear-eyed realization that the priority must be making the game accessible and sustainable to every woman and girl who wants to play it.

Q: OK, let's start at the top, with FIFA. Shouldn't we be holding them to account over Equal Pay and Equal Prize Money?

A: I can see why you would conflate the two issues, since much of the media has. But they're entirely separate.

Equal pay refers to what women's national teams earn relative to their men's teams. In some federations the women's team is not just more successful, but also generates comparable, if not greater, amounts of money than the men's team. It's not quite pay in the sense that these aren't salaried employees, but more like contractors. It's also complicated by the fact that for most of the bigger men's teams, the bulk of the players' earnings comes from their club sides and the national team stipends are basically pocket money, whereas for the women they're often the main (and sometimes only) source of income. So it seems justified and reasonable to treat them equally.

Norway were among the first federations to do it and in the U.S., the women's team took legal action last March.

Q: What about prize money? The men's prize money pool in 2018 was $400 million. The women's prize money in 2019 just $30m...

A: Like I said, that's a totally different issue. The men's World Cup also had 32 teams instead of 24 so on a per-team basis, on average, the men's prize money was 10 times as high. There's a reason for that. (I'll get to it in a minute.) But what many seem to fail to understand is that prize money doesn't go to the players. It goes to the federations that then decide how to allocate it.

Some of it goes on World Cup preparation and expenses -- in the case of less wealthy federations, FIFA covers the cost with an additional pot of $20m -- some of it goes to players and staff. In the case of men's teams there's another massive expense relative to the women too: insurance. FIFA pays the cost of insuring players at the World Cup itself, but not for qualifiers and friendlies. But obviously you need to play qualifiers and friendlies to get there.

In any case, there's nothing stopping successful women's teams like the United States from going to their federation and demanding equal pay, as they have done. It shouldn't be tied to prize money.

There's also another, more pertinent, reason why discussion about investing in the women's game shouldn't focus on prize money.

Q: What's that?

A: Increasing prize money would simply steer more cash to those who need it least. The countries who perform best at the Women's World Cups are all wealthy nations with the best-established women's football programs. All eight of the countries with the most registered women footballers reached the Round of 16 in France and seven of the eight made the quarterfinals. That shouldn't be surprising: when you have far more players to choose from and more money to train them you usually end up winning.

FIFA's mission is to promote and develop the game worldwide, not to run a commercial enterprise which rewards countries who already enjoy all sorts of advantages. Every dollar spent on prize money is a dollar not going into development, and FIFA's job is primarily development. Roughly a quarter of FIFA member nations (156 of 209) don't even field senior women's teams and it's extremely difficult (if not impossible) for a woman to play organized football at any level.

This gap is why there's such a disconnect in the conversation. The U.S. and Australia, two of the countries that have pushed hardest for increased prize money, are actually two of the ones who, frankly, need it least. The U.S. has more than 1.6 million registered women's footballers, which is roughly 40 percent of all registered women's players in the world. It has Title IX, which ensures opportunities for women to play at university level. These are luxuries most of the world's countries can only dream of.

Demanding more prize money from FIFA smacks of a "first world" attitude if it comes at the expense of development money, especially when they can (and should) get more pay from their own FA.

Q: What exactly do you mean by "development money?"

A: These are funds that FIFA sends to member associations to promote football development. It can mean everything from coaching education to building pitches and training centers to buying equipment to leasing minivans to drive kids to matches. Right now, in addition to the general funds that FIFA makes available to member nations, they also have half a billion dollars earmarked specifically for women's football programs.

As Infantino says, if you don't run a woman's program that meets certain requirements, you don't get the money.

Q: Can we trust FIFA to hand out this money, given their past history of corruption and malfeasance? A football pitch is a football pitch after all: how do we know it's going to be reserved for women's football? In fact, how do we know it's not going to be used for some local FA official to build himself a new swimming pool?

A: No doubt stuff like that happened in the past, as Infantino himself readily admits.

Money just leaks out of the system. FIFA say they have tightened up requirements and oversight to ensure it won't happen. And, possibly because of this oversight (or maybe because they simply don't care), many FAs have left money on the table, But it requires more vigilance on a local level, that's for sure, and it requires education -- people in less developed footballing nations demanding the funds are spent -- as well as, perhaps, some solidarity from the bigger, wealthier countries.

Q: But aren't FIFA sitting on $2.75 billion in cash reserves (money sitting in the bank at the end of the last fiscal year). Surely they can do both: increase prize money and increase development funds?

A: Of course they can, and that's what FIFA President Gianni Infantino has pledged to do. He wants to double prize money to $60m (plus another $40m to help cover World Cup expenses for less wealthy nations) and also double development funds for the women's game from $500m to a billion over the next four-year cycle. It's just a little disappointing that so much of the talk has focused on prize money and not development.

In any case, hopefully this whole argument will be moot next time around...

Q: How's that?

A: What many don't seem to realize is that more that 95 percent of FIFA's income comes from a single tournament every four years: the Men's World Cup and, specifically, the sale of tickets, commercial and broadcast rights.

Effectively, the Men's World Cup subsidizes everything FIFA does, from development grants to organizing competitions like the Women's World Cup, youth tournaments, beach soccer and so on. Without the Men's World Cup, none of these things would exist because none of them can pay for themselves -- at least that was the case in the past.

Take the current cycle from 2015-2022: those rights were sold off between 2010-12 and FIFA would sell its international tournaments to broadcasters as a package deal by territory. You'd pay for the Men's World Cup, primarily, and they'd throw in competitions such as the Women's World Cup, the Under 20s, futsal and beach soccer for "free." Infantino vows to change that when the next set of rights -- for the 2027 World Cup -- comes on the global market and, on a regional basis, possibly earlier.

He pointed out that the Men's World Cup, with its global reach of around four billion, generates $6.5 billion in revenue. If the Women's World Cup in France reaches a quarter of that audience, it should generate a quarter of the Men's World Cup revenue, or around $1.6 billion. Instead, because the commercial and broadcast rights are bundled with the men's, it has generated close to zero: some ticket sales, minor local sponsorships and some merchandise and/or concessions.

When he took charge of FIFA in 2016, Infantino appointed a dedicated head of women's football, Sarai Bareman. Now the goal is to market the Women's World Cup as a separate competition. If you look at the numbers and audience, surely sponsors and broadcasters will come on board. That's a huge first step and when it happens, it will be easier to increase prize money as well. But the goal, as far as FIFA is concerned, has to be development, grassroots and access to the game.

Q: What about the top end, the women we saw at the World Cup in France?

A: Here again it's complicated and this is where the biggest decisions need to be taken, not so much by FIFA but by those who care about the women's game. Some see professional women's leagues as a key stepping stone to promote and grow the sport. I'm not so sure.

Q: How come?

A: There are basically two models for this. Neither has had much success thus far, though it's still early. In Europe, they've tried to piggyback off of men's clubs. On the surface, it makes sense since you already have a strong brand, ready-built facilities and a fanbase that loves the club. Commercially though, it has been tough.

Atletico Madrid drew more than 60,000 for the visit of Barcelona last season in Spain and 39,000 showed up to watch Juventus take on Fiorentina in Italy. In reality, those are one-off, heavily marketed games that saw many tickets given away free or at deep discounts. Atletico's average attendance is about 600 a game while Juve attract less than 500.

Even in England's Women's Super League, or WSL, the only fully professional league in Europe, attendance is less than a thousand people per game. The Times reported that the FA, which runs the WSL, "did not see the women's domestic game as a long-term project" and "were not the ones to take it forward."

In the United States and Australia, they've opted to create leagues and clubs from scratch with a franchise system. The first attempt at a fully professional league was the WUSA, launched in the wake of the 1999 Women's World Cup, which lasted three years before investors pulled the plug. (There's an excellent ESPN 30 for 30 about it.) Another league, the WPS, was started a few years after that and also went bust shortly thereafter.

Now there's the NWSL, in its seventh season. They've tried to avoid mistakes of the past by being more conservative in their spending (an approach also taken by the W-League in Australia) and their attendances, around 7,000 a game, are the highest in the world. (Those numbers are swelled a little by the staggering success of the Portland Thorns who average 20,000 a game, which is higher than 14 of the 24 MLS clubs.)

Q: OK, so the numbers aren't huge in most cases, but it's still sustainable professional football, right?

A: Well, yes and no. The three fully professional leagues have very tight salary caps. The average NWSL salary is $21,000 (with a minimum of $16,000) and in the W-League, it's $14,000 (with a minimum of $7,000). If that's your only income, it puts the player close to the poverty line. In the U.S. in particular, where many of these players are college-educated and have more lucrative career options, it can be a tough sell.

In England's WSL, the average is around $34,000 but many teams are losing money: both Manchester City and Chelsea, for example, lost more than a million dollars last season on their women's teams. Elsewhere in Europe you have a mix of professional teams paying high wages and being bankrolled by benefactors and amateur sides, with players taking second jobs.

So I guess it depends on your definition of sustainability. For now, it's sustainable under the European model if someone subsidizes it. And it's sustainable under the U.S./Australian model if you pay players a pittance.

Q: So are you saying that we should just abandon women's professional club football?

A: Not at all, silly, but we need to remember that the men's game has a hundred-year head start and didn't turn fully professional in most cases until 50 years ago. In other words, it grew organically, which is why it's so important to grow the base, develop the game and get people playing, perhaps more so than seeking out investors to bankroll professional clubs.

The reality is that investors, whether they're NWSL owners or big European clubs bankrolling their women's teams, want to see a return on their investment at some point. And if it doesn't materialize soon enough, they often walk away, as they did with WUSA and WPS. Reaching profitability from scratch takes time.

Q. So what should they do?

A: First of all, realize that the landscape across the globe is different and what's good for women's football in the U.S. may not work in China or Brazil or Germany.

Second, don't automatically mimic the professional men's game and its structures, whether it's the European set-up or the U.S. version with franchises and no promotion/relegation. Those models developed over time for different reasons, neither is perfect and, most importantly, they may not fit the needs of the women's game.

In Europe, where a number of countries have a couple of professional teams and the rest are amateur, that might mean creating cross-border leagues to raise the standard and generate commercial critical mass. In the U.S., where distances are vast and travel costs massive, that might mean regionalizing play.

More broadly, rather than insisting on the word "professional" (i.e. paid) maybe the emphasis ought to be on "full-time", meaning ensuring women have a guaranteed certain number of hours to train per week, along with mechanisms that allow them to take time off. That would expand the base and help the club game grow organically.

Most of all, maybe they could learn from other sports, like cricket and rugby.

Q: Oh? Why those sports?

A: Because cricket and rugby, despite having been around for a very long time, face some of the same challenges -- and have some of the same strengths -- of the women's game. They're not mass participation sports the way men's football is and, like women's football, they have to compete for attention. But they do have a thriving international game that commands huge audiences -- think the Six Nations in rugby or the Ashes/Twenty20 in cricket -- and the Women's World Cup showed that women's football can attract comparable audiences. So maybe the objective should be to monetize international women's football since the interest is already there.

Infantino wants to create a Global Nations' League, along the lines of the very successful UEFA Nations' League. That could well move the needle, and you already kinda see it in the U.S. with the women's team "Victory Tour." Indeed, this is one of the starkest differences between men's and women's football and, perhaps, one that the women's game ought to embrace: stars are identified more with their national teams than with their clubs.

Megan Rapinoe was all over the mainstream media after the World Cup, yet very few casual fans could name the club for which she plays (the Seattle Reign). It's evidence of the different balance of power that exists in women's football. You couldn't imagine, say, Manchester United releasing Paul Pogba two months before the World Cup and then letting him go on a France national team victory tour for a month afterwards the way many U.S. women did.

Q: OK, but they can't just make a living playing for the national team, they need club football, no?

A: Sure. But maybe the answer is, if the international game is lucrative enough, putting a pool of players (say the top 50 or top 100) on central, or "national team," contracts with the federation. (This is how it works in cricket.) That would give you a talent base from which to choose from and relieve the pressure on leagues like the NWSL and others to pay the players.

And maybe, at the high end, you can create seasonal tournaments for the world's top players.

Infantino talked about a Club World Cup: it was one of his five proposals on the eve of the Women's World Cup final this summer. You take the world's top 24 club sides, put them in one place for a month and host a tournament. With fewer travel costs, centralized promotion and more stars, maybe it can work. Or -- and I admit this is out of left field -- you have mini-tournaments where the stars are drafted in, like the Indian Premier League does for cricket, to play in short, offseason competitions outside of their result club careers.

The point is there are creative solutions. Men's elite football, with its polarization, imbalance of power and Euro-centrism, doesn't need to be the model for the global women's game.

These are all conversations that need to be happening. FIFA can help -- and after decades of hindering, they're finally on board -- so too can sponsors and investors. (But, remember, their help comes with strings attached.) What the women's game needs most is people who care about it sitting down and figuring things out. And that needs to happen before the window of opportunity generated by France 2019 closes.

Selection streak continues for a nervous Neita as she clinches 100m spot in GB team for IAAF World Championships in Doha

For the first time in her senior career, Daryll Neita faced a nervous wait to find out if she’d gained another British vest.

An impressive streak had seen the 23-year-old achieve an automatic individual major championships place in every GB team since she graduated from the junior ranks in 2015. Even in that year she made it to the IAAF World Championships in Beijing as a teenager in the sprint relay squad.

Securing British 100m silver in 2016, 2017 and 2018 qualified her for the Rio Olympics, London World Championships and Berlin European Championships. Now she’s looking to build on all that after her bronze medal at this year’s British Championships and 11.19 season’s best saw her picked for the third 100m place on the 72-strong team heading for the IAAF World Championships in Doha later this month.

“I’m feeling absolutely amazing today,” she told AW. “I had the dreaded wait of not knowing if I was going to be picked. Just to get that spot again and have another chance to prove what I can do, go out there and kill it, I’m really excited.

“Most years I have come top two – in 2016, 2017 and 2018 I came top two at trials so that’s the automatic. This year I came third and I really didn’t know if I was going to get it.

“I had a week of waiting and honestly, it was the hardest thing! My heart was beating so fast.”

While some junior athletes can struggle with the step up to senior level, Neita says she benefitted greatly from attending the World Championships in China four years ago. Although she did not race, the experience of being on the team was invaluable and set her up for more.

“I was lucky enough to get invited to Beijing 2015 as part of the relay team,” says Neita, who that summer had finished fourth at the European Under-20 Championships in Sweden. “I didn’t have a clue what I was doing there! But what I did know is that prepared me for the next year and I knew that I wanted to make the individual in 2016.

“I’d come from the European Championships as a junior, on to Beijing, stayed in a hotel with (Usain) Bolt, Dafne (Schippers), Elaine (Thompson) – I was like ‘okay, now I know what it’s about!’ That prepared me going into 2016.”

This summer has also been a learning curve, but in another way, the Jonas Dodoo-coached sprinter adds.

“My season so far, I feel like it has been a different learning experience for me,” she says. “It has been more ‘how can I mentally lock into what I am doing?’ and if things don’t seem like they are going the right way, how do I still stay focused?

“I feel like around the Anniversary Games I had a bit of a turning point. I did a lot of work with my psychologist and since that point, I’m feeling like myself again and I’m on that run. I think I’m going to see really good progression from that.

“Although I know I am physically in better shape and I am ready to drop some really good times – it’s just mentally getting that in check. Not giving up, not doubting yourself, staying positive. That has been a really big learning thing for me this year.”

No British woman has ever reached a 100m final at a world championships, though Neita came close when finishing fourth in her semi-final in London two years ago – the best ever result by a GB female.

“What I am hoping for in Doha is to shock myself with anything,” she smiles. “Make that final and anything can happen from there.”

KNOXVILLE, Iowa — The 16th annual Lucas Oil Late Model Knoxville Nationals will be run Sept. 12-14 at Knoxville Raceway.

It is the only annual late model event at the Sprint Car Capital of the World, with the sport’s best racers uniting under the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series banner for three nights of racing on the historic black-dirt, half-mile oval at the Marion County Fairgrounds.

Twelve different drivers have won the prestigious event with inaugural 2004 event winner Brian Birkhofer, Scott Bloomquist and Mike Marlar each having won the race twice.

Other drivers to win the Lucas Oil Late Model Nationals are Brian Shirley, Brady Smith, Tim McCreadie, Don O’Neal, Steve Francis, Darrell Lanigan, Jared Landers and Jimmy Owens, who won the race in 2018.

Four of late model racing’s biggest current stars — Bobby Pierce, Brandon Sheppard, Josh Richards and Jonathan Davenport – have yet to conquer Knoxville Raceway.

For a greater historical perspective of the Lucas Oil Late Model Nationals we take you inside the numbers.

153 — Laps led by Scott Bloomquist during the Lucas Oil Late Model Nationals, more than any other driver.

15th — Starting position of 2004 winner Brian Birkhofer, the deepest in the field any driver has come to win.

10 — Most top-10 finishes in the Lucas Oil Late Model Nationals … Scott Bloomquist.

15 — Jimmy Mars is the only driver to start all 15 Lucas Oil Late Model Nationals A mains.

98 — Car count for the inaugural event in 2004. Fifty-eight cars were on hand in 2008.

7 — Laps led by Tony Stewart in the Lucas Oil Late Model Nationals.

Winners List

2004 – Brian Birkhofer
2005 – Scott Bloomquist
2006 – Brian Shirley
2007 – Brady Smith
2008 – Tim McCreadie
2009 – Scott Bloomquist
2010 – Billy Moyer
2011 – Don O’Neal
2012 – Steve Francis
2013 – Darrell Lanigan
2014 – Brian Birkhofer
2015 – Jared Landers
2016 – Mike Marlar
2017 – Mike Marlar
2018 – Jimmy Owens

It’s the last fling before spring! Experience the world’s best late model racing at Knoxville Raceway’s Lucas Oil Late Model Nationals! Thursday, Sept. 12th through Saturday, Sept. 14th.